'Manet: A Model Family' Review: A Modern Master and His Kin
An exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum focuses on the French painter and his unconventional relationships with his parents, his wife, her son and his sister-in-law.

Boston

Édouard Manet: We thought we knew him. An upper-class bon vivant, a fervent modernist who flouted artistic traditions but remained a realist even as he blazed a path for the Impressionists (whom he befriended, especially Berthe Morisot), Manet (1832-1883)—whose masterpieces include "Olympia" (1863) and "A Bar at the Folies-Bergère" (1882)—died young, of syphilis.

Manet's Parents

"Manet: A Model Family," at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum through Jan. 20, 2025, adds a new dimension to the man and his work, focusing on his unconventional family, with its crisscrossing, sometimes ambiguous relationships. Diana Seave Greenwald, the Gardner curator who organized the exhibition, argues that without the involvement of his improbably stable and happy family, Manet could not have created the avant-garde pictures of contemporary life that drew scorn at the state-sponsored Salons but later placed him among the greatest artists of the 19th century.

Like many exhibitions, this one started in the museum's collection: "Madame Auguste Manet" (c. 1866) was purchased by Gardner in 1910 on the advice of Bernard Berenson, the well-known art connoisseur and critic. The striking but glum portrait was, he told her, the "great Manet" she'd been seeking. In it, Manet's mother appears life-size and in mourning attire about four years after her husband's death. With its darkness broken only by the curved back of her chair and the flesh of her hands and wrinkled face (with its visible mustache), the painting lends credence to the words of one critic who, referring to another painting, called Manet "a merciless portrayer."

Suzanne, with Leon added

"Madame" embodies the theme of this enlightening exhibition as one of several relatives who sat for Manet and who, by financing him and hosting salons for his artist friends, abetted his career.

The show—about 40 paintings, works on paper and documents hung chronologically—first introduces the artist's nuclear family. Near a pensive 1876 portrait of Manet by Carolus-Duran, the celebrated Parisian painter who taught John Singer Sargent, Manet's "The Croquet Party" (1871) depicts Suzanne Leenhoff, the Dutch pianist who'd been hired by Manet's father to teach his sons and who later became Édouard's wife, and her son, Léon, enjoying themselves on a seaside green.

Leon

Then the intrigue begins. Visitors meet "Monsieur and Madame Auguste Manet" (1860), Manet's brilliant portrait of his stern father, a high-ranking judge who initially opposed his son's decision to be an artist, shown in pain from late-stage syphilis, and his dejected mother. Considerable scholarship suggests that Auguste fathered Léon—not Édouard, as some have speculated. Though Édouard met Suzanne in 1849, he married her only in 1863, after his father died, and they never legitimized Léon, as both Cezanne and Monet had done with children born out of wedlock.

Manet hints at his father's blame in "After the Bath" (c. 1861), a wash drawing depicting Suzanne as a voluptuous nude, and in an oil sketch, "Study for Surprised Nymph/Moses Saved From the Waters" (c. 1858–61). Both place her in poses resembling Old Master paintings of the biblical Susanna and the Elders tale. In that story, young Daniel rescues Susanna from adultery charges lodged by two lustful old men.

Berthe Morisot

Another clue comes in "Study for Moses Saved From the Waters" (1852-61). Created when Manet was using family members as characters in history paintings, the most valued genre at the time, it shows Suzanne awkwardly holding a baby resembling Léon. The pose seems significant: Suzanne initially passed off her son, more than 20 years her junior, as her brother, a masquerade Manet aided, blurring the age difference in such paintings as "Reading" (c. 1868–73). That work originally showed only a lovely Impressionistic vision of Suzanne—tender as always—but Manet inartfully added Léon in a corner, which Ms. Greenwald suggests may signal his love for the family.

Manet's feelings for Léon seem to have evolved since his strange earlier work, "Fishing" (c. 1862-63), a painting inspired by Rubens and Annibale Carracci that Manet painted to celebrate his marriage. Manet and Suzanne appear in one corner, dressed as Rubens and his wife, Helena Fourment. Léon, with a fishing rod, sits diagonally across the canvas on the far side of a riverbank, alone and distant.

Manet often used Léon, sometimes in costume, in paintings, watercolors and prints—continuing to blur his age. He seems young in "Boy Blowing Bubbles" (1867), which harks back to Chardin and, just a year later, is a teenager in the brushy, wistful "Young Boy Peeling a Pear" (c. 1868), which relates to a work by Jusepe de Ribera.

Manet's Mother

Manet also famously mentored and painted Morisot, who became part of the family when she married his brother Eugène. Whether she and Édouard had an affair, as many suspect, is left unsaid, but they were close. With his 1869-73 portrait of her in a fine hat and fur, Manet was showing Morisot how to paint with quick, sketchy brushwork to yield the unfinished look she wanted. Interestingly, Suzanne purchased this work after Manet died—dispatching thoughts of jealousy. Later, when family tensions surfaced and Suzanne was denied part of his estate, Morisot helped support Suzanne.

"A Model Family" humanizes the aloof Manet we know, and then it does more. It provides a key to understanding some of his paintings on a deeper level.